In the Depth
by HappierThanMost
Summary: In his school essay, Ponyboy reflects on his soul and the dark depths where it resides.


_This is not my usual, this tiny one-shot that lacks an appropriate amount of dialogue, action, plot, movement. Basically, it's Pony's English essay (in his junior year of high school) as well as the product of a current struggle with my own writing. I'm going ahead and publishing it cause I'm the kind to get too shy to post again if I let enough time sneak by me. Please don't feel you have to review this! It is what it is..._

 **In the Depth**

 _I sit on the porch steps, take my freshly sharpened pencil to my lips and blow away the shavings that float down onto the unfinished assignment balanced on my lap._

Life in the Depth  
by  
Ponyboy Curtis  
English, 3rd Period

Something woke up inside of me. It was no surprise; this part wasn't meant to lie dormant forever. Sooner or later it was bound to be poked, disturbed into a jarring wakefulness. Since then everything inside's been somewhat shrouded by its hungry, rabid shadow and the innocent kid in me was swallowed whole years ago.

I have a propensity to gloom. As high as I can go I can crash that much further. Vivid sunrises and magnificent night skies are as real as all those gallows and gaping graves that tug their reminders on the sleeves of every stargazer. To feel much is to feel all of it, from the tender touch to the brutal blow. I wouldn't trade it. There's something to be said for intensity.

Sometimes a song lyric, or the way the music aches all on its own, or even just the horn of a lonely train can steal me into that vast underland from which my oldest brother tried to pull me, constantly getting onto me for my head being stuck in the clouds. But my head's not anywhere near high, where things are wispy and all light. No, I can be found deep down below the surface. Where tragedy collides with beauty, and it becomes almost one and the same.

So I write, I draw, I play music, I read the greats and hold onto their words that somehow reach for me down in those dark depths where you seldom meet another. When you do come across that rare soul you recognize, you grasp the hand they throw you and become something larger. And then maybe, just maybe you have a taste of what life's really about. But the feeling vanishes as quickly as it starts, because all things worth holding are fleeting and intangible, too perfect to be owned, possessed only by God.

I sometimes wonder what life might be like if I were more like my brother Darry, the most normal person I know. He doesn't have the time to wrestle anything beyond a life that plays out entirely on the surface. I don't envy him. He may not have to deal with a heavy pain that's unexplained, that lacks all logic and nonetheless seeps through bone and strangles the heart in its clutch, but he's also left out and unavailable for its sweet rewards.

Pain, like any good calculated abuser, rewards his deserving children that make themselves vulnerable to all these torturous feelings. Just as life's tiniest moment can pierce the heart, also the tiniest moment can strike a chord so pure and beautiful it's nothing short of a miracle. When goose bumps are raised and pulse quickens, hair stands on end at just a smell or a sound, a painting, a memory from a time that reappears. The smallest things can be as large as the universe and just as much of a blessing. Only those that reside in the depths can partake in that kind of life and its graces.

I've found my brother Soda sometimes in the underneath. I can tell by his reactions when I open up to him that he feels it. But feeling it in only the ways he can, being himself one of the great enigmas. Soda doesn't belong fully to any world. He's high and low all in one, managing to manipulate his own surroundings and riding in on his all-consuming wave, the one that he created. He's the rarest of the rare. And he doesn't even know it. Or if he does, he's so used to his abilities, comfortably casual in his magnitude, he appears unaffected by everything that he is.

I've never been normal, but for my first thirteen years I led an ordinary, average life. In one tragic second, the bough broke, shattered when our traitorous car skidded and flipped and rolled over all that we were, and the deepest, darkest part of me was provoked. It took over so fast I immediately forgot what it felt like to be without it. Or maybe only then did I finally realize it was always who I was. At that crucial moment, I, at thirteen, swam down into the cavernous waters and all these years later haven't resurfaced still, walking through life turned inside out, all my nerves exposed, ready and willing to be devoured by the horrific and the heavenly, the mammoth and the minuscule, equal in all their importance.

 _I write my last sentence just as the final light sinks beneath the western horizon._

 _"What's your essay on?" Soda asks from the corner of the now darkened porch, reminding me I'm not alone. Only his eyes are visible, shining in the orange glow of his cigarette._

 _"It's some self-reflection exercise," I answer him as I close up my spiral notebook. "We're supposed to write about ourselves and what drives us. I'm realizin' what a fortunate and tortured soul I am," and I smile to myself and crush my smoke, grinding it between the sole of my shoe and concrete._

 _"I could've told you that," Soda says and means it. He's laid out on the porch swing, all arms and legs, lazily riding the gentle breeze that moves him back and forth._

 _"Soda?" I ask after several seconds of comfortable silence._

 _"Hmm?" is all he can muster, lulled by a humid, sleepy night._

 _I propose my question anyway. "How would you rather go through life? Feelin' zero pain but more numb than anything, or feelin' the highest highs and lowest lows, both in equal measure?"_

 _The chains that hold the swing start rattling, disturbed when he shifts his position, and he's ready to give the answer I already know._

 _Suddenly Darry's voice erupts through the screen behind us. "I'd choose the highs and lows." Surprised, I turn to watch him come out to join the conversation, spraying OFF all over himself and us. Soda's strangled cough fights against the fog of bug repellent as Darry goes on. "A flat line ain't how life's s'posed to go."_

 _My eyebrows are raised in surprise at Darry as he sits on the steps beside me, but he can't see my face. Soda's choking finally subsides and we all three relax into the silence. Three souls in recognition of each other, all our senses aware, meeting somewhere down in the painful and beautifully deep abyss._

 **A/N:** The Outsiders by SE Hinton


End file.
